


Look me in my Eyes (Tell me Everything’s not Fine)

by Shadows_echoes



Category: Shatter Me Series - Tahereh Mafi
Genre: Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Dystopian World, Enemies to Friends, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, I think there's maybe 3 of us in total, Sarcasm, Superpowers, eventually. maybe., i totally had time to write 5k+ and am not busy at all atm, is anyone even in this fandom online? does it even exist?, self-control who?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 09:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17978450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadows_echoes/pseuds/Shadows_echoes
Summary: Based on the prompt: the hero shows up at the villain’s doorstep one night. They’re shivering, bleeding, scared. There’s also a slightly dazed look in their eyes– they were drugged […]. Looking up at the villain, swaying slightly as they’re close to passing out, they mumble “…didn’t know where else to go…” then collapse into the villain’s arms.





	Look me in my Eyes (Tell me Everything’s not Fine)

The side of your fist hits the smooth white front of the wooden door so harshly that the skin over your bones threatens to bruise. Not that you notice. Or care.

You keep knocking— if you can call it that, that is. It’s more like pounding. Hammering. You’re hammering your fist against the door in the hope that it will open— in a desperate, sloppy, chaotic last-ditch hope that it will open right now.

“Leila!” You shout at the nearly invisible seam between the door and doorframe as if that would somehow help your voice carry— as if that would get you inside faster. “Leila, please! It’s me, Y/N.”

The words are loud. Too loud. Far, far too loud in your otherwise silent surroundings. They echo around your skull, ringing, bouncing around with an alarming intensity that’s dimming, dimming, dimming as your head fills up with fog.

The amped-up sedative in your bloodstream is affecting you more rapidly than you had initially thought— than you had wanted to believe.

Once you had slipped away from your make-shift guards and back into the real world, you ran. You ran at a flat-out sprint for as long as you could maintain, lungs bursting at the seams, heart thundering in your ears, deafening, and a taste of copper in the back of your mouth. You ran as fast as you possibly could with tar in your veins, lead in your limbs, and blood seeping from your skin and into your clothes. You ran, and this place, these few disgustingly, unnervingly pristine blocks that lay untouched by the havoc which now wrecked the world, was the first landmark you recognized.

You had intended on running right past these houses and into the more desolated wooded areas not far from here until you found a safe spot to hide away in until the drug wore off, but your legs had different ideas. Your feet led you here, to a house you had only been in a handful of times a lifetime ago, to a house you remember a kind woman once living in.

You don’t know if she will remember you.

Or if she still lives here.

Or, granted she is still here, if she’ll even take you in-

No.

No, she’s home. She still lives here. She has to.

The street is coated in darkness over your shoulder, illuminated only by the few-and-far-between stars peeking through the dark, cloudy sky. The porch you’re on is dark, too, but the faint light seeping through the cracks between the window curtains acts as a beacon—a spotlight broadcasting your location to the entire world, to anyone left in it who’s interested enough to look.

You’re not so foolish as to believe you lost them, they’re too good for that and you’re far too disoriented, but you would like to think you bought yourself a few minutes of time at the very least.

It’s hard to tell though.

The trees lining the front yards across the street are entirely blurry now, blending into their suburban background of white picket fences far too well for your liking.

The stinging sensation in your right forearm and left leg have practically numbed altogether, and the strain in your muscles and lungs may as well be gone too. It is all still there, you know that, but the feeling of it is becoming inaccessible to you.

You can’t smell anything either, not even the blood staining your clothes.

And your hearing…

You don’t know how much longer you have until you pass out. What little of a head-start you might have had is gone now though, you do know that much for sure.

“Please!” you try again, and it sounds slurred. “I didn’t have anywhere else to-”

The door is wrenched open so swiftly that in one second you’re staring at the increasingly blurry grains of wood, and in the next you’re staring at someone’s chin.

A part of you wants to ask Leila when and how she had grown half of a foot taller than you remembered her being, but by the time your brain catches up and your eyes see the face looking back at you, you’re already stumbling backwards.

No.

No,

No,

No,

No.

No.

Not him.

Shock courses through your veins and panic rifles through your brain, setting off every alarm bell still functioning. Confusion follows in its wake, and it all adds to the ugly mix of out-of-breath panting and the drugged tissues of your body which have turned to concrete. Immobile.

The subtle details of his expression are blurred and cast in a slight shadow due to the warm yellow light streaming past him from inside the house. From what you can tell though, Warner does not look happy. Not that you blame him though, considering that the last time you saw each other was when you shot him and then jumped out of a window after Juliette and Adam.

It had been quite the string of coincidences, really, that day.

Your hate for the Reestablishment and the fact that you never wanted to be a soldier in the first place led to two different outcomes. The first was a thick and colorful record detailing your insubordination and other “offenses” against your superiors which had been amassing since the very start of your training. 

The second was your plan to desert.

Unfortunately, planning to successfully run away from a military base was less easy than you had hoped. It took time to collect some provisions, find a way off base, find someplace to go after you left…

You did it though, meticulously put together a plan to desert which was as foolproof as it was ever going to get. Except, days before it was to all take place, your plan fell apart due to an event which would have led to increased security, harsher superiors, stricter orders, and even less freedom than you were already granted.

Though your carefully crafted hopes for your future were viciously ripped from you mere days before they could take place, a different opportunity had been thrown directly into your hands and you had been physically unable to let it slide through your fingers like your original plan.

That day you happened to be inside the main building when a code seven alarm went off. You heard shouting from one of the rooms, went to investigate, and lo and behold you found an open window with “escape” written all over it, perfect for you to climb through and into freedom. 

The only trouble was that between you and it stood three other people.

Juliette.

Adam.

And Warner.

You read the scene you walked in on quickly enough—it wasn’t difficult considering the weapon Warner had been aiming at the other two, the two with interlocked hands and an open window at their backs.

The rest was history—a blur of actions and reactions you hardly had time to think through or decipher.

You stopped desperately seeking a way out of the life of a soldier you had been forced into—stopped looking for a chance to leave and an exit through which to run; you found one, and you were leaving.

A hand that wasn’t your own had aimed your gun at the back of Warner’s head while a voice not dissimilar to yours told an incredulous Adam to grab Warner’s weapon. Keeping Warner in your sight, you then backed towards the window with Juliette and Adam at behind you.

Warner had not been particularly pleased. In fact, he mentioned some rather violent consequences and, when you failed back down, he lunged for your gun.

You pulled the trigger.

The few people currently looking for you might be bad, but this… Him… Warner… This might be worse. This is out of the hands of pissed off, blood-hungry citizens, and into the hands of the ruthless Chief Commander and Regent of Sector Forty-Five.

The one you shot as you looked him in the eyes.

Run.

Run, your mind screams at you.

Run as fast as you can while you can and don’t look back until you’re dead, otherwise you will be.

But you can’t run.

The floor shackles itself your feet, locking you in place even as the porch starts swaying before your eyes.

You think you manage to take a single stumbling step backwards. You assume you must have, at least, for the cold, smooth railing of the porch materializes beneath your hand and keeps you upright— keeps you standing as a tide of vertigo brushes over you.

Another few steps backwards and you would be down the stairs and on the front lawn. That’s the direction you want to go. Out. Away. Far away from the tall, imposing, deadly figure slowly stepping out of the doorway to approach you.

But your legs refuse to move even more insistently than they had a few moments ago, cooperating even less than they had. Traitors. They would get you killed.

Warner says your name.

He says something else too, something that sounds like a question. You can’t make it out—the sounds you hear don’t sound like words, but a chain of syllables strung together in an odd tone that’s even less decipherable than the sounds themselves.

Technically, you knew Warner could be here.

You knew, somewhere deep, deep down in the recesses of your mind that there was the tiniest, smallest, fraction of a possibility…

But surely, surely, you thought, your luck could not possibly be that bad.

You were wrong.

Darkness encroaches your vision, blurring and blocking out your surroundings one by one in a dull, unnervingly subtle wave.

The eyes looking back at you are the last things to fade out of focus.

They’re green eyes. So, so green.

Not the green of hatred or even the green of authority with that familiar fire always, always burning just below the surface.

But the green of a young boy you once knew in a lifetime before the world ended.

Green bleeds into black.

-

The first thing you notice when you wake is the pounding in your head— an amalgamation of the dull pain residing there and your own thudding heartbeat mixing together.

The next thing you notice is that you’re still alive, and –you open your eyes— unrestrained.

The fog which consumed your mind is gone now. You can acutely feel its absence in the clarity of your thoughts— in the clarity of your confusion, but… But tendrils of it still remain, a sheer film of murkiness lingering ever so slightly over your mind.

“Oh, good. You’re finally awake.”

Your head snaps towards the voice.

And your eyes…

Your eyes find Warner.

Warner.

Right.

Shit.

He sits at a small table in the corner of the room and holds your heavy, undoubtedly confused and startled gaze with ease. His left arm is in a sling. In his right hand he holds a data-pad which he sets down on the table without looking away from you. The device now sits a few inches away from the sleek black gun also on the table. Both remain within easy reach for him.

You swallow.

Your head spins as you sit up and as you try to understand why you’re not dead yet, why Warner hadn’t killed you immediately and on sight. Why, instead of bringing you back to the compound and throwing you in a cell, he brought you into what you think is the spare bedroom in Leila’s house and waited for you to wake up.

You know it must boil down to information, it always does, but still… It’s odd.

It’s a shame you’re unwilling to divulge anything serious though, anything at all that he might be interested in. A real shame, considering said information is probably all that’s kept you alive as of late.

Warner observes you in silence and with shrewd eyes, like he’s reading a book with a lot of unfamiliar jargon but reading through it all the same. The look puts you on edge, as it is likely supposed to do.

“I’m not going to tell you anything, you know.” It’s a hedged warning, a cautious one, but a warning all the same.

“But you haven’t even heard my questions yet,” Warner replies in a tone all too pleasant.

You shift atop the covers of the bed, more than thoroughly uncomfortable, and pain threads up your arm as you do.

Oddly enough, the three people who had grabbed you yesterday only hurt you enough subdue you. One of them had recognized you as a solider and they planned to interrogate you for information and—wow.

Wow. You really just traded one interrogation for another, didn’t you?

You really are that unlucky. Damn.

Regardless, after telling them that you had deserted they spent the next few hours arguing about what to do with you. One option they discussed involved taking you to the “others” –whoever they were— and the other few options they contemplated all ended rather bloodily for you.

Needless to say, you did not sit idly by while they so candidly discussed your apparently ever-shortening future. As luck –or your lack of it– would have it, however, you ran into one of them after slipping your restraints and she shot you up with a syringe half full of a goddamn sedative before you managed to get away from her. You want to blame it on said sedative for your clumsiness, but in your hurry to escape you jumped a fence rather poorly, managing to snag both your forearm and your calf on two different pieces of exposed, jagged metal.

Both injuries had bled a fair amount at the time. Now, they’re no longer bleeding. Now, white gauze spotted with dried blood peeks out at you through the blood-stained tears in your clothes.

You stare at the bandage on your forearm, blinking at it slowly as though it would answer your questions if you only looked long enough.

Why?

Why would he do that?

Why on Earth would he put in the two minutes of effort to help you –in any way, let alone medically– if he planned on killing you at some point anyway? Why-

You don’t understand this— what kind of game he’s playing.

And… And he’s not giving you any clues, even unintentionally.

You don’t have any superpowers, not like the ones you have heard rumours of, ones whispered about in hushed tones filled with awe or brushed off with a scowl, and you certainly don’t have any abilities like Juliette’s.

As it turns out, however, you do have exceptionally good hearing.

So that’s what you do now, in need of any kind of additional information available, you listen. You quiet the world inside your head, still the questions on your tongue, move past the noise of your own body, of Warner’s, of the idle sounds of shifting fabric and measured exhalations of breath, and you listen.

The sounds which greet you do little and less to placate your worries.

The house itself is alive.

Alive and humming with the sound of electricity buzzing in the rubber-wrapped wires behind the walls and the water flowing in the pipes beneath the floor under your feet, with the low thrum of the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs and the roaring of the furnace in the basement tick, tick, ticking away the seconds until it turns off again.

The building is alive with the signs of life and inhabitation.

It’s also empty.

Not abandoned, empty.

Unoccupied.

Save for you and Warner.

“Where’s Leila?”

Out of all the questions dancing around your brain, you’re unsure why that one makes it past your lips.

You also have no clue what you had been thinking last night –for you assume it was last night given the early morning light streaming through the window a few feet from Warner— aside from the fact that you hadn’t been thinking. Sure, why not show up on a woman’s doorstep, begging for help, despite the fact you hadn’t seen her in years and— oh, yeah, you shot her son less than a week ago.

Yeah. That was bound to go well.

Fuck.

“Not here,” Warner answers crisply. “Who were you running from last night?”

The question hangs in the air, suspended by silence.

There’s a high likelihood Warner already knows about the group who grabbed you for you assume he must get at least some reports about civil unrest, but on the off-chance he doesn’t…

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

Despite how they so plainly discussed different ways to pry information out of you and other things you would rather not think about, you’re hesitant to blow the whistle on them— not when they are one of two groups willing to speak out, to do something about the Reestablishment. Hell, you might have helped them had they not been so… rough.

Well, rough and hateful.

Apparently, they had heard rumours about the resistance— about Omega Point, about how it housed people with abilities which might help to take down the Reestablishment. They hadn’t been fans of that, even using some artfully constructed and colorful language to describe the “freaks” there too.

“Where are Juliette and Kent?”

With any luck? Far away from here.

At the time, you had thought that you were rather smart, that the one bonus of your surprise escape –as opposed to the one you had planned– was that Warner would be focussed on trying to find three missing people as opposed to just one. Both Adam and you needed to take care of some personal business –though neither of you asked or wanted to know what the other’s was– and you both thought your odds were better if you split up into two groups. Besides, they didn’t trust you and you didn’t particularly trust them– not with your life, anyway.

Though the three of you knew that Juliette would probably be Warner’s top priority, you were not overly worried about either her or, by extension, Adam. No matter how terrified she seemed or how… oddly kind the few words she had spoken to you were, she could, after all, kill someone with a single touch.

After going your separate ways a few days ago and a few quick pitstops on your end, you had been en route to… Well, you’re not entirely sure where. You’ve heard rumours– a lot of rumours about where Omega Point is supposedly located and you’ve narrowed it down to a general area. That’s where you had been going yesterday before you got jumped.

You’re not sure where Juliette and Adam had intended on going –it’s best that way– but you can only assume they had made it there safely if Warner still hasn’t found them.

“Is whatever happened to you happening to her?”

His voice is harsher now. Stern. It’s less like the pleasant tone he began this conversation with and more like the one he uses to command the entirety of Sector Forty-Five.

His patience must have run out.

“Why do you care?” you counter, snapping out the reply before you can stop yourself. Then… Then you see it. You see his fingers curling together, tightening, and a muscle in his jaw clenching. You know the response is not due to anger either, at least not entirely. So, for some reason you don’t want to think about, you end up relenting after a quiet sigh. “Not that I’m aware of.”

The answer seems to appease him, but only for a moment. Without missing a beat or even chewing over the only answer you’ve given him, he asks the one question you least expect.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

You gape. “What?”

Asking if you heard someone correctly has not really been an issue for you, not when you have the ability to hear the blood being pumped through a person’s veins and the grinding of their teeth, but… but that…

You had been mentally psyching yourself up for an interrogation– for roughly asked questions about the resistance and their numbers, about the extent of the dissent among his soldiers and troops, more about Adam and Juliette– especially about Juliette. Not-

“I was point-blank when you shot me in the shoulder,” he continues, seemingly oblivious to the now thundering rate of your heart and the rising emotions in your throat. “It would have been a clean shot, an easy kill. Yet you decided not to kill me. Why?”

“I missed.” The blatant lie thoughtlessly, stupidly, carelessly slips past your lips in a small voice that isn’t your own.

And Warner… Warner only smiles.

He smiles.

He smiles like your two meager words are best things he’s heard all month, like he’s suddenly enjoying this. Like talking about how easily you could have killed him but didn’t is amusing to him.

To make matters worse, it’s not a cruel smile of barbed wire and rusted nails. In fact, it’s almost… nice. It actually looks good on him. More than good, unfortunately. But it is wicked, a pleased display of a mind full of cutting knowledge locked behind an array of sharp white teeth and soft lips.

“The worst of my soldiers would have been incapable of missing a shot like that,” he says, “and I have seen you shoot, love. You have some of the best marks of all the soldiers within Sector Forty-Five. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you missed?”

The surety with which he speaks turns your blood into ice, makes it congeal and crystalize in your veins. It blooms enough apprehension and fear inside your chest that you can’t even correct him over the sobriquet he uses– though you’re sure your expression shows enough of your displeasure to make your feelings on it obvious.

You’ve seen more emotion in Warner in the last ten seconds than you have in the last ten years and you don’t know how to handle that- how to deal with the odd assortment of unorganized facts and small, peculiar details you’ve been handed.

The emotion contouring his features makes him look ten years younger too. It reminds you that Warner is, in fact, your age. 

You had become so acclimatized to his blank expression cross-referenced with the occasional scowl and sharp commands that you became convinced the kind boy you once knew was long dead— that Supreme Commander Anderson had slowly, torturously killed him over the years and replaced him with Warner.

Then, a few weeks ago, you saw a brief, momentary, flickering crack in his façade, there and gone again in a moment. It made you remember the little boy with pale green eyes who took you out of the very house you now sit in, away from the wrath of his father which your short temper would have surely evoked. You had disliked Warner then, in that moment and with your young, righteous heart from keeping you from yelling in all your rage at his obnoxious, horrible, insulting father.

It was only later that you had come to realize the boy’s actions for the unnecessary kindness that it was. Though you never figured out how he had known you were seconds away from talking back rather sharply to his father, you were glad he had. He might have just saved your life.

That hadn’t been the only time you had met that summer, for you had seen each other a handful of times, but it had been the first– and the notable.

Warner is calm. You know that with certainty because you can hear his heartbeat: strong, steady, regular. He’s not the slightest bit ruffled or stressed. You suppose having a gun at one’s side helps with that.

In lieu of an answer you can’t give and don’t know how to provide, you keep listening.

To him.

To the house.

To the yard beyond the barely open window.

To wind filtering through the leaves of nearby trees, carrying whispers of halved-sentences.

Of voices.

It’s not Warner’s voice, though Warner is saying something to you. You can hear him in the back of your head speaking clear, understandable words, but you’re not listening to him anymore.

No, you’re listening to the other voices, ones you recognize.

Angling your ear towards the window, you strain your hearing to its full extent, cursing whatever remnants of sedative still lingering in you for making this more difficult than it usually is.

A quick debate in sharp tones, that’s all you’re able to pick up.

Then a click.

A distinct click that is all too familiar, one that doesn’t need any explanation.

You know the sound that will soon follow it too.

“Get down.”

“Excuse me?”

You don’t repeat the softly spoken words, not that there’s time to reiterate anyway. A sleeve is already being dragged against the coarse shingles below it, flesh is readjusting– tightening over a piece of hard, military-grade plastic.

You’re up and across the room before you even realize you’re moving– before you know what you’re doing– before you recognize your hands pushing at Warner’s shoulders.

By the time the two of you hit the ground, he’s somehow already switched positions and has you pinned you to the floor, no doubt assuming you’re trying to attack him.

But you’re not trying to attack him. You’re not even trying to fight him.

A half second later, you hear the sound you had been expecting. It’s rather difficult not to though, the bullet fractures the window panes in an explosion of glass before embedding itself in the wall above your heads with a soft thump.

You can feel Warner freeze at the sound, the sudden rigidity of his muscles.

You press yourself into the floor as two more bullets are fired, wishing for all the world that you could slip between the cracks of wood and rematerialize on the floor below.

Warner shifts as well. Closer.

Between the screaming of your heart and the ringing in your ears, a fleeting thought crosses your mind that you’re being covered. That Warner is covering you. Then the thought is gone– as it should be. He’s just trying to get closer to the ground.

He turns his head slightly to the side, towards you, and you wait, half frozen as you hold the calculating eyes which bore into you.

This time, when he asks who is shooting, you have no qualms about telling him.

This time, you answer without hesitating.

Because this time it feels different.

It is different.

“Civilians,” you state. “Third-party; hate the resistance but hate the Reestablishment even more.”

“How did you know they were here? How do I know you’re not with them?”

The words have a funny pitch and sound as though you’re listening to them through a pool of water. You’ve come to expect that part, the temporary and partial loss of hearing after listening to something particularly loud, but it’s still disconcerting to experience—to live a life listening to the uproarious, never-ending, screaming cacophony of the world and then have it just… vanish.

Needless to say, you became quite good at reading lips within the first few weeks of living on the military base of Sector Forty-Five.

You scoff at the words you see, and half hear, his lips saying. Or maybe you laugh, you’re not too sure which. “Narcissistic much? They were after me, I think you just became a big bonus though.”

Friend or foe? Enemy or ally?

Truth or lie? Deception or misperception?

The questions storming through his eyes and over his hardening features are obvious.

Warner pushes himself higher off of the ground, off of you, and you don’t need the full extent of your hearing to know what a bad idea it is.

Your hand, of its own accord, latches onto his elbow as you hiss at him to wait.

But it’s too late.

The warning is unnecessary.

The gunshot which follows his slight movement is sufficient warning.

Warner ducks down again.

Idiot.

What was he thinking?

God, what were you thinking? Trying to warn him? Pushing him out of the way? Coming back to this house in the first place?

Your own thoughts and feelings are so disorganized that it’s hopeless to sort through them, but when Warner looks at you there is such a mix of surprise and confusion– suspicion and intrigue in his eyes that whatever traction you might have had over your own feelings is immediately lost.

“They’re shooting at both of us,” you state.

The reminder, whether for him or for you or for both, works.

A long moment passes– a moment in which the ringing still in your ears quiets enough for you to hear the hearts, yours and his, crackling like thunderstorms and the intentionally slow breaths being forced into and out of two sets of lungs to try and counteract the rapid beating.

Warner nods, a fractional dip of his chin.

He looks over his shoulder, his good one, at the now glassless window, then at the door half-way across the room, his eyes calculating angles and distances as they trace a path to escape.

You listen, extending your hearing as far as it will currently go, examining the spaces around you and the roof next door for any tell-tale signs of dangerous activity to be careful of.

When Warner’s gaze again meets your own, it is you who nods this time.

The two of you crawl as close to the door as you can without being seen, and another shot rings out as you dash across the remaining distance and into the hallway.

Warner had snagged the gun from the table before leaving the room and now holds it extended in front of him, keeping a watchful eye on both you and the rest of the house as you silently make your way downstairs.

You could tell him that the house is still empty, that this isn’t some kind of ambush, but you don’t. You could also tell him that the shooter and his friend scampered off of the roof they had been perching on after failing to shoot either of you, that they’re now out of your hearing range entirely, gone, but you don’t. It would only lead to too many questions and fewer chances of your own escape– something which you still have every intention of doing.

So when his wary and watchful attention habitually leaves you to scan the next room, it’s easier than you expect to trip him up and pry the gun from his hand.

You aim it at his chest.

“Well, this seems oddly reminiscent, doesn’t it, love?”

Outwardly, Warner is as calm as ever, his face a pleasant and blank mask. The mask is too tight, though, its edges plainly visible and showing the frustration underneath. You know he’s ready to risk a bullet and fight if need be, but he also does not look particularly surprised. He just looks… wry and nearly disappointed.

“I won’t go back to being a soldier,” you say, “and certainly not for the Reestablishment.”

You’re not sure if the words are a warning or an explanation, but either way he does not heed them.

Warner steps towards you.

A bullet pierces the floor in front of him in a miniature explosion of splinters. You wince at the sound and from the pain it causes, but it’s worth it. Warner stops advancing.

His expression is grim, eyes narrowing. “You won’t kill me.”

It’s a hard statement, nothing remotely close to a question, and you wonder how such conviction came to be. 

There were a handful of times you thought you would be able to kill Warner if given the chance, that you could stomach doing it given all of the horror he’s allowed, but then things changed. The boy you once knew made a reappearance, surfaced for a few heartbeats too long, and changed everything.

Shooting to impair him is one thing, but…

You swallow– swallow the self-doubt, the curiosity, the regret, the pain, the nostalgia, the rage, the despair– and hope that your actions today don’t royally screw up future events, that this day won’t haunt you for the rest of your life no matter how short that ends up being.

“You’re right,” you admit, “and please don’t make me regret that, Aaron.”

Warner stiffens at the name, at his name. He freezes as if he hadn’t heard it in years, as if you had summoned up an ancient ghost and just carved out his heart as a sacrifice.

He makes no move to stop you as you slowly back out of the room, never taking your eyes off him for fear of snapping him out of whatever daze of memories he’s found himself in.

You walk backwards out of the house.

Out of the yard.

Then you turn, running, sprinting as fast as feet will carry you all the way to Omega Point.

**Author's Note:**

> Huge shoutout to @pandemoniumambassador on tumblr who beta'd this for me and got me hyped up enough to actually write it in the first place <3
> 
> You can find the og prompt on tumblr if you want as well: http://shadows-echoes.tumblr.com/post/182787307971/the-hero-shows-up-at-the-villains-doorstep-one


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